In July, Susannah Hopkins Leisher took off with her husband and three kids to live ‘off-the-grid’ in Maine, leaving behind their suburban New Jersey home for a wooded mountaintop cottage.

“We can see to the horizon about 35 miles distant, tapering off into low blue hills, and closer in, three shivering silver lakes. The Appalachian Trail crosses our access road enticingly, just below an ice-cold spring,” Leisher writes in their latest dispatch.

Find out more about what the whole family’s up to on the Times’ Green blog.